


Trace

by des-troyer (devilsalwayscry)



Category: Devil May Cry, Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne
Genre: Depression, Gen, suicide ideation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-08
Updated: 2019-10-08
Packaged: 2020-11-27 23:02:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,894
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20956358
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/devilsalwayscry/pseuds/des-troyer
Summary: Dante, from Mallet Island, to Vie de Marli, to the Vortex World.(For the unofficial fic request of "Dante and how he ended up in SMT: Nocturne.")





	Trace

**Author's Note:**

> My sibling said "You should write a drabble about 2D ending up in the Vortex World (the world in SMT: Nocturne)," and my brain said, YES, LET'S DO THAT INSTEAD OF ANY OF YOUR 100 WIPs, DES. This is not a drabble, brain. We need to have _words_.
> 
> Sort of rambly, but I decided to use this as an excuse to just write, without stressing about things like editing and coherency and all those other pesky details I worry myself over, in an effort to fight back the Bad Brain stuff that's kicking me with writer's block right now.

It wasn't him.

That's what he tells himself at first. It wasn't him, not any more. It hadn't been him in—in a while, it looked like. Just a ghost he had to put to rest.

It gets him to the finish line, numbs his reality enough that Dante's able to drag himself all the way down to the bowels of Mallet Castle to finish the job. Keep moving, keep fighting, keep going.

Revenge is a powerful motivator.

* * *

Dante doesn't care much when the castle starts collapsing right on top of him. Not much left to care for, at that point, and if he's going to die, he's happy to die right here (where _he_ died) so long as the bastard who killed his family goes, too.

He doesn't die. Trish drags him out of the rubble, loads him up in a plane, and instincts pretty much take over from there. Dante's on autopilot up until he gets back to the shop and he's standing in the middle of the lobby, surveying the destruction from Trish's first encounter and staring at the Sparda where she's leaned it against his desk and smelling the thickcloying_fresh_ scent of _his_ blood on every inch of Dante's arms and hands and he sort of just. Snaps.

Doesn't come around until an hour later when Trish is standing in the doorway, the Sparda held in front of her, Dante's blood dripping slowslowslow like tar down the blade and into a puddle on the floor. He looks down at it, looks down at his chest, the diagonal hole from right breast to lower left ribs that's slowly knitting itself back together.

Forces the fangs in his mouth to flatten back down to blunt instruments. Wills his claws back in to his fingertips. (Relishes, in a way, in how it hurts. The pain is good, centering. He's got to remember that, just in case.)

Licks the back of his teeth to make sure there's a normal, human amount of them before he flashes her an open-lipped smile.

"Keep it," he says, nodding to the sword. "I think it likes you."

She looks down at it, looks back up at him, brow pinched. Opens her mouth to speak, but Dante waves her off with a flick of his wrist.

"You got anywhere to go?"

She shakes her head.

"You're welcome here. Got spare rooms on the second floor," Dante says, turning his back on her, talking to the ugly head of a demon pinned over his desk. When'd he even kill that one? "It's not much, but better than nothing."

She retreats upstairs while he traces the claw marks he's scoured in the top of the desk with his fingertips. Bends down and picks up the photograph of his mother, shakes the broken glass out of the frame, and sits it back on the desk again.

His fingers brush worn leather, a memento forgotten in his rage. He's torn it to shreds. Another casualty of his inattention. Scorched earth, he guesses. Burn down every trace of him that remains while he's at it—may as well.

May as well.

* * *

The Devil Arms he picked up on Mallet screech and scream and beg in protest as he locks them up in the damp, dark cellar at Enzo's pawn shop, never to be seen or heard again. Dante thinks he should probably feel bad for them, being semi-sentient beings and all that, but he doesn't. They're demons.

He takes the Rebellion back while he's there. Doesn't have another choice, now that he's given away the Force Edge. It hums hot and eager under his hand the moment he touches it, like it's happy to be back in his grasp again, and god, he hates this fucking sword.

It still smells like his blood (but less than Alastor does, now).

* * *

Trish doesn't stay long. Dante's not that surprised. He's not easy to live with, hasn't been since he was eight years old and shared a bedroom with a doppelganger who knew everything about him without him needing to say it. Never learned how to properly communicate, cause of that. Makes him a bad roommate.

He gives her every bit of cash in his stash, leaving himself with just enough to pay the next month's rent. It's the least he can do, he says, when she stares at it in quiet understanding and shock. Sorry he couldn't do more, he adds, when she looks a little too sadly at him.

Trish shakes her head. "Take care of yourself, Dante."

He just smiles.

* * *

Dante jumps on the first job he gets that reeks of "hellgate." Goes through the motions, because these people deserve the help, even if he's really just using them to get to the end goal. 

When it comes time to decide who's going in, it's not even a choice. 

"What if you can't come back?" Lucia asks, like Dante should care.

He shrugs. Thinks, _That's the idea._ Tells her not to worry about it.

Dante kills the demon that opened the gate, listens to the suction_pop_ of air and reality as it snaps shut behind him with a sort of twisted satisfaction, and sets off in a random direction.

* * *

Hell's boring. The hellgate spits him out in a place a lot different than the pocket of hell he'd gone through on Mallet—more barren, more desolate, less fleshy. He walks and walks and walks, but never finds anything interesting except hordes of mindless demons for him to kill his way through, and even then, they're barely worth his time.

Once, he feels a flicker, the faintest twitch at the back of his mind. Deja vu. He spends what feels like an eternity trying to track it down before it fades out of existence again like it was never there at all.

He convinces himself he made it up.

Eventually he gets tired of walking, so he starts poking his nose in things he probably shouldn't. Rifts that glitter with pinpoints of light like stars in the midnight sky. Portals that whirl like a vortex deep at the bottom of the sea. Trenches filled with glowing fungus and soft, pale pink grass, vibrant and warm and reeking of sickeningly sweet decay.

Most of the portals he goes through drop him off somewhere else in hell, like a one-way plane ticket to another continent. One, a silvery pool of water that stinks of old blood and makes his hair stand on end, drops him off in an adjacent mirror dimension. (He spends so long exploring this that he collapses, twice, from exhaustion. He still doesn't find him.)

Another takes him to a part of hell that looks like a 50s era retro shopping mall—geometric patterned carpet, pea green walls, overhead lights that still work as if there's electricity running through the place. (This one's his favorite. It even had a pretzel stand.)

He goes through whatever catches his eye. He doesn't really give a shit where they'll take him, what might happen when he goes in one, he just knows that where he started in hell is a dud, so he needs to move further, faster.

Not like he has anything better to do, anyway, and hell, maybe he'll get lucky, walk through a portal and _bam_, there he'll be. Jackpot.

It's a nice dream, at least.

* * *

He doesn't find him.

He does, however, find a god.

* * *

Dante's in a room that's too bright and too large, an impossible void of pure white nothingness as far as the eye can see. Before him are two figures: an old man, hunched in a black chair, and a woman, dressed like she's in mourning, a black veil covering her face.

"You're looking for something," the woman says, then she pauses, tilts her head toward the old man at her side, and amends: "some_one_." Next to her, the man looks at Dante with eyes as flat and dull and blank as a dead thing's. 

He's a demon, Dante can tell—big one, extra nasty, despite the human guise.

The worst ones tend to like playing human.

Dante says, "Maybe."

"We would be willing to help you with this," she says, voice soft, understanding, like she knows what he's after.

Fuck her.

"Not looking to sell my soul to a demon."

Her laughter sounds like glass shards in a rock tumbler, steel nails on a chalkboard. It sends a shiver up and down his spine.

"Nothing so uncouth as that," she says, humming quietly in her amusement. "You are a legendary demon hunter and we have a demon that we would like you to hunt."

Dante spins Ebony in his hand, points it at the man. Considers pulling the trigger on principal, but then he pauses, because. Well. They're right, aren't they?

He's a demon hunter. Best one there is, probably. What's one demon if it gives him some direction?

"Convince me," Dante says, cocking the gun for show. He can't see the woman's face behind the black veil she's wearing, but he gets the impression she's smiling.

"He's still alive."

* * *

Dante stalks the target—a kid, but he's a demon, too, Dante can sense it—through the hallways of hell because that's what he's been hired to do, and damn if it isn't actually fun. Kid's good, in an unpracticed and new to his power kind of way. A little sloppy, but he recruits demons like he's made for it, bends their will under his at the drop of a hat.

He's, what, maybe sixteen? And he makes a pact with a demon like it's not a big deal.

Dante's impressed. The first time they fight is the most fun he's had in probably a decade; the second time, he tells the kid he needs to get better, because Dante's honest to god thrilled at the prospect of seeing him really shine.

By the third fight, Dante's decided he's been played. Should've known better than to take a job from a demon (from a god). Ushering in chaos isn't really his style, even if the reward is everything he's ever wanted and more, so the last time he sees the kid, he throws his aim and plunges the Rebellion into the ground next to his stomach instead of through his rib-cage. Offers him a smile and tosses him the key he's been hanging on to.

"My old contract's just been nullified," Dante says as the kid pushes himself to his feet. "So, you hiring?" 

It's not what he's looking for, but. It's something. Dante doesn't know if the old man was lying about if he's still alive or not, doesn't know if that was part of the game, but either way. Dante can't, in good conscious, end an entire world over it.

Besides, he's curious to see this whole thing play out. A quick pit-stop on his larger journey. Learn a little something along the way.

(If he's being hones with himself—which he rarely is—Dante's not even sure how to leave, but he doesn't worry about that much. He's good at stumbling his way in and out of situations.)

When the kid says yeah, Dante grins—means it, for once. Pulls the coin out of his pocket, figures he can get at least one more good use out of it.

"Heads or tails?"

**Author's Note:**

> Hello yes I live on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/desalwayscries) (though it's mostly Spardacest and very little SMT, if that's what you came here for).


End file.
